THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

After his Balkan-Wars King Lear, followed by the boulder-orchard Desire Under The Elms, we've come to expect Wagnerian-scaled technical effects when Robert Falls directs in big rooms with big budgets. The universe in this world-premiere production is conjured chiefly through Richard Woodbury's aural score, spanning ornithologically accurate bird calls in the New England countryside, the ominous buzzing of flies near a row of corpses and—during a blackout lasting just long enough to make us nervous—the terrifying crash of a catastrophic mudslide.

This doesn't mean that Walt Spangler, whose profile has been rising like the flood waters of his current project's title, doesn't supply us with plenty to look at: would-be lovers washed up naked on a mound of frigid debris where they make desperate love—as people often do when death looms too near—make for an image lingering in the memory as indelibly as Lear's barricade of body bags. Our locales also take us to jewel-box luxury train compartments, cavernous freight cars stuffed with theatrical paraphernalia, and 19th-century wing-and-border sets populated by parodies of stiff Delsarte melodramas, froufrou Broadway extravaganzas and early European naturalism—performance styles in vogue during our play's period.

That's right, our play—remember? Rebecca Gilman's account of that fatal day in 1889 when a Pennsylvania resort's artificial lake overflowed its banks, wiping out the adjacent industrial village of Johnstown. And of the demographic insularity fueling the environmental neglect facilitating the disaster. And of the capitalist exploitation that followed in the wake of destruction. And of the distortions imposed on witness accounts to romanticize the often distasteful facts. And of the pure-in-heart artists, then as now, powerless to do anything about it.

Gilman's research could have been crafted into an epic historical novel on the order of Gone With The Wind, a neo-Victorian tome to be contemplated over leisurely reading, instead of being compressed into two and a half hours of real time. The athletic cast vaults its text's chronological gullies and sloughs with plucky agility, but can't prevent us recalling the words of the young actress who recounts how her playwright father would first imagine his stage settings, then wait to "see who lived in them." The Goodman production has its scenery—in abundance—now needing only a more focused narrative to move in and make itself at home.